The Communist Party is trying to tighten its grip on the Chinese diaspora
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Ms Song is typical of many Chinese who have moved to the West in recent years: well-educated and wealthy, unlike the labourers who dominated earlier emigrant communities. The number of Chinese abroad has doubled since 1990. It has risen particularly fast since 2000. The pandemic heightened the desire of many members of the elite to leave, as their resentment grew of covid-related controls and the party’s ever-tightening restrictions on freedom of expression. China ended its battle against covid late in 2022, but its faltering economy and high youth unemployment are fuelling people’s anxieties. Many young Chinese now use the term runxue, “the art of running”, to convey their desire to flee.
There are about 10.5m people living outside mainland China who were born on the mainland. Only the Indian, Russian and Mexican diasporas are larger. Some of these Chinese are among the country’s richest people. In many countries, they have long dominated wealth-related visa schemes. More than 70% of the 81,000 investor visas issued by the American government to dollar-millionaires between 2010 and 2019 were given to Chinese citizens. Since 2012 some 85% of people who have received Australia’s “golden visas” for investing over A$5m ($3.3m) in the country have been from China. All but 41 of the 1,300 people who applied for the equivalent Irish scheme in 2022 were Chinese.
Chinese-born entrepreneurs founded Zoom, NetScreen and WebEx, but there are far more people of Indian descent running giant firms, including Adobe, Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Microsoft, among others. Silicon Valley companies may recruit directly from India for leadership roles but typically choose not to do so from China, says Frank Pieke of Leiden University in the Netherlands. […]
In politics, people of Indian origin fill some of the highest offices in Britain, Ireland and Portugal, yet there are few elected politicians of Chinese descent anywhere in Europe. The Chinese government is now encouraging such people to get more involved in local and national politics, hoping they will help to nurture more positive attitudes towards China in the countries where they live.
It’s well known that Asian people in general, but East Asian people especially are discriminated against for leadership roles and this is a comparison that’s not really apt. I would be curious as to whether Japanese immigrants and their descendants, who are also largely well educated, represent a similar share per capita of leadership positions as Chinese immigrants and their descendants do.
Very alarming that the Chinese government is encouraging Chinese immigrants to get positions of power in foreign countries.
I wonder how many non-Chinese are in the CCP or running large Chinese firms?
What I’ve noticed is there wat more of a Chinese identity than there is for other countries. Usually if a white person moves to another country and has children the children grow up identifying with that country.
But go to China Town anywhere in the world and it really does look like China, the newspapers are all Chinese newspapers for example (not that nationality in Chinese actual Chinese).
White people used to have an identity that held. Like Britisher for example. But I doubt any Aussies would say they are a Britisher.
The only exception is Americans than are actually American and 99% German but have 1% Irish so they tell everyone are Irish (but they actually know nothing about Ireland).
I’m really not sure this is accurate, you’re looking at a caricature of a society (China Town), there is selection bias in your example.
Also think about your example of a white person moving to another country. Is that country still majority white? To make an equivalent argument you need to look at white communities in east asian countries or African countries. Do those examples support this position?
Admittedly I don’t know many because I haven’t lived there but from what I know white people that have moved to Africa or Asia they think of their children as from that country.
But they much more often marry locals. Asians tend to marry within their ethnicity or even their family and tend to think of themselves as that previous nationality.
How many white people are elected in Asian and African countries? They don’t seem as well received as the locals compared to the west.
I’m in my own bubble community so it’s hard to say whether it’s true, what makes me question that is my own experience.
Here in NZ we don’t really have a China Town, there are higher asian concentrations in certain neighborhoods but you tend to get those with various cultures.
My friends (and myself) that are east/south east asian do keep an Asian identity but we don’t hold as strong of a nationality attachment to our original country. I was raised in NZ, our ways of life are better than probably most other nations out there.
This is not the same as our parents who did grew up in Asia but I think that’s understandable.
My personal barrier to be considered as from NZ is not internal, it’s external. When people see me, the first guess at nationality is not NZ/kiwi but Chinese. The first question is where am I from (country of origin). This is a major concern for me in the US because of appearances.
I’m not sure I can really square that with belonging to a nation truly, so what am I left to work with here?
Well I actually have an answer to that but that’s a wider opinion about nationality in general.
The question really is how many people like you would betray your country for China? Vs how many people with parents from somewhere in Europe betray nz for a European country.
Is that really the question? Framing it us vs them doesn’t help either group. This is not a zero sum situation where you defect or don’t.
But I don’t think this question is worth considering because considering loyalty to country is like considering faithfulness to a religion. It doesn’t put you on the right side of morality. People like me don’t draw that line based on place of origin.
I would hope NZ would not take the same route that so many countries around the world are taking and take on identity politics. So far we seem to be doing on average better than that.
China right now has few residents who were born in a foreign country – there are now only around 1 million foreign-born residents in China, or less than 0.1% of the population.
What a stupid concern.
It’s not a concern, it’s pointing out hypocrisy. China wants its foreign nationals in power elsewhere, but doesn’t want foreigners in its own country and makes it extremely rare for them to get citizenship let alone participate in decision making.
If the proportion of foreing nationals with the intention of building their life in your country is minuscule, them having significant representation in the general power structures is a non-issue. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in the event that China grew a significant immigrant community, they still wanted to deny them representation, but complaining about that right now is akin to a Brazilian complaining that Norway wants them to protect their jungle when Norway isn’t protecting their own jungle.
If I was a good-hearted Chinese politician, I would also be trying to get Chinese migrants in Western countries to get adequate representation, because that would help them get some muscle to protect themselves if they were ever going to be discriminated against.
Right, ignore the entirely obvious political ramifications of why China wants these people in positions of power and pretend it’s because good hearted party officials think they need protection.
They can’t be wrong if they change the goalposts.
If you begin to oppose good decisions because there are monsters with their own self-interest in mind backing them, you are going to take terribly stupid positions, such as turning against defending Ukraine from Russia. Opposing Chinese minorities getting representation similar to their population is just as racist as opposing black people getting representation in US institutions or Muslims in French ones. Just oppose representatives who are undoubtedly serving spurious interests.
